Cameron Watt: Giving the unborn a route out of poverty

Cameron Watt is Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Justice, he writes here in a personal capacity.

Earlier this week I accompanied IDS to NAVCA’s annual conference at Keele University. (NAVCA is the national umbrella body for community groups and the councils for voluntary service that support grassroots projects around the country.) The conference was entitled Breaking the exclusion cycle - can the voluntary and community sector help build a more equal society? and our old friend Polly Toynbee was chairing.

Unsurprisingly, the agendas Iain and Polly presented for tackling poverty were rather different. However there was one principle that both were agreed on: the need for effective early intervention in the lives of our most vulnerable infants to arrest and reverse intergenerational poverty. Iain stated that a full appreciation of the urgency of ensuring the most vulnerable under-threes are given every opportunity to thrive was been the most significant development in his thinking during his chairmanship of the Social Justice Policy Group (SJPG). A lack of proper nurture in a child’s first three years can do irrevocable damage to a child’s mental health and cognitive development. Clearly, parents from dysfunctional families often struggle to provide this, perpetuating disadvantage and the associated crime and disorder. 

Polly Toynbee is probably the most committed evangelist for New Labour’s early years programmes. Trouble is, increasing evidence suggests her devotion may be little more than blind faith. Take SureStart. If there’s one signature initiative that ministers extol as the acme of New Labour’s fight against poverty, it’s SureStart. Conceived by Brown’s Treasury, SureStart was an area-based scheme intended to ‘deliver the best start in life for every child’ by bringing together early education, childcare, health and family support to help families from pregnancy until children were four years old. 

In 2005, a £16m government-funded evaluation of SureStart found that three-year-olds born to teenage mothers in SureStart areas scored lower in verbal ability and social competence and higher on behaviour problems than their counterparts in non-Sure Start areas. Furthermore, Durham University research published last month shows that Government's early years education overhaul, which has cost taxpayers more than £21 billion since 1997, has failed to improve development levels of children entering primary school. A six-year study of 35,000 children found that children's development and skills as they enter primary school are no different than they were in 2000. Since then Labour has introduced the early childhood curriculum, expanded the Sure Start programme and introduced free nursery education for all three-year-olds.

With such a record of expensive failure, efforts to alleviate disadvantage in the early years could be considered futile. Would the money not be better spent elsewhere? In a word – no. The Government’s early years programme needs a major overhaul to ensure taxpayers receive value for money, but the right kinds of investment could reap huge dividends for society.

A key principle for reform must be ensuring that resources are invested in the most needy families. On a visit to my church’s curate and his lawyer wife here in Kennington, I noticed a SureStart branded storybook on their kitchen table. Yet this is just one example of a national trend whereby middle-class parents in mixed, urban SureStart areas have spotted the shiny new centres and moved in en masse to take advantage of free childcare and other facilities. Of course there’s nothing at all wrong with middle-class families receiving high-quality public services, but they shouldn’t be resourced from programmes to address poverty among the most disadvantaged.

To increase the effectiveness of early interventions, more intensive and flexible one-to-one help should be made available for the most vulnerable mothers and babies from pregnancy onwards. As the mothers needing most help are currently unlikely to venture into Sure Start centres, mentoring should be provided in their homes. 

Programmes such as Nurse Family Partnership show what can be achieved. Pioneered in Baltimore 30 years ago, it greatly improves life outcomes for vulnerable children and their parents. Mothers-to-be are offered intensive one-to-one help from health visitors starting during their pregnancy, right through the first three years of their baby’s life. A follow-up study of 15-year-olds who had benefited from the programme as infants showed that compared to their peers, they had 56% fewer days of alcohol consumption, 56% fewer arrests and 81% fewer convictions. Although initially expensive, in the US the cost of the program was recovered by the first child’s fourth birthday, with further substantial savings over the participant children’s lifetimes - $5 for every $1 spent.

With such a long-established evidence base, it’s appalling that this programme is only now being piloted by the Government in a handful of areas. British voluntary organisations such as OXPIP (chaired by Conservative PPC for South Northamptonshire, Andrea Leadsom) and PIPPIN have a track-record of providing similar high-quality support. The SJPGroup advocates a major expansion of Nurse Family-type programmes for the most vulnerable as a matter of absolute priority. Hopefully the majority would be delivered by voluntary sector groups.

To help ensure that the neediest infants benefit from these programmes, the SJPG proposes a new incentive. Receipt of the front-loaded child benefit proposed would, for the most vulnerable, be dependent on mothers’ participation in the scheme and progress in partnership with health visitors. Along with the privacy of assistance in their own homes, the significant potential increase in their incomes is likely to motivate most of the mothers targeted to participate. 

Health visitors running these schemes would operate out the family services hubs the Group envisages. These would be created to enhance current, community-based service provision, improving the efficiency and co-ordination of professionals and voluntary sector providers. The hubs’ overwhelming focus would be greater support for parents in their children’s crucial first three years.

Although its desire for effective early intervention is laudable, New Labour should not be praised for ploughing on with early years programmes that are failing to make sufficient impact. Conservatives can learn from their mistakes now and in government re-direct resources to proven interventions for the most vulnerable mothers and babies. Combined with a raft of proposals to reverse family breakdown, major progress could be made to reverse the intergenerational poverty that still blights our country. 

Comments

[Tony Makara]

I believe driving mothers of young children into work is an anti-family agenda. The mother should be at home during the childs formative years, to give the child a sense of family and to prevent the feelings of alienation that lead to anti-social behaviour in later life.

[Dave Bartlett]

There was an interesting Thinking Allowed programme looking at what politicians could do to improve the chances of poor children.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/thinkingallowed_20070905.shtml

[Will]

" The mother should be at home during the childs formative years, to give the child a sense of family and to prevent the feelings of alienation that lead to anti-social behaviour in later life. " - Tony Makara.

Why should the mother be the one to stay at home?

[Peter Franklin]

Great article, Cameron -- this is a vital area of policy and Labour is making a multi-billion screw-up of it.

[Tony Makara]

Will, obviously if the female of the household has the greater earning potential then it would make economic sense for the mother to work while the father looks after the children. However it is my opinion that women are naturally more in tune with nuturing, a woman does a better job of 'mothering' than a man in most instances.

[Cameron Watt]

Tony - I very much agree that during the child's first three years it is best for them to have one parent around as much as possible - which is generally going to be the mother. If mothers of the most vulnerable children can be given the help they need to be the best parents they can be, it is probably best for them to be at home during their child's first three years than being pushed out to work to do part-time McJobs which have to be heavily topped-up with tax credits.

[Neil Reddin]

I'll get the pedantic bit out of my system first:
"Of course there’s nothing at all wrong with middle-class families receiving high-quality public services, but they shouldn’t be resourced from programmes to address poverty among the most disadvantaged."
The programme is resourced from the taxes that the middle-class families have usually paid more of.

Anyway, a good article which shows how Conservatives can make inroads into territory that most would consider reserved for the Left. SureStart also demonstrates the folly of planning around disadvantaged "areas" when it's the people (and most importantly) children who are disadvantaged (whether through bad luck, poor decision making earlier in life or plain fecklessness.

[Tony Makara]

Cameron, A situation that particularly worries me is when a mother in a single parent household takes up work outside of school hours. For example working in the evenings with the child/children left 'Home Alone' and unsupervised. I have seen this played out in my own locality where children are playing out until late waiting for the mother to return home from work.

Ideally I should like to see the mothers role as a mother and carer given its due recognition. Labour's attempts to cajole mothers away from their children and into work is in my opinion socially disruptive. At a time when children are looking for stability the last thing they need is a latch-door lifestyle. Labour's patchwork attempts to create a half work/half benefits economy built on tax credits will have serious consequences in the long run. I certainly agree with the concept that work is the way out of deprivation, but I am concerned that in giving the child the material wealth it needs we may at the same time be taking away the childs sense of security. The last thing we need in broken Britain is another generation of alienated young people.

[Graeme Archer]

The evidence that SureStart is not v good is quite overwhelming. THis is a great article Cameron. The difference between us and them on this issue isn't that of morality - all good people want good starts for children - it's one of - I think- raw ideology. Quite strange. Conservatives want lots of small local providers of pre-school care and interventions, socialists want a state-approved, centrally-owned one. Of course the middle-classes will grab the lion's share of anything going, just like they do in everything. There's a real-life anecdote aboot Sure Start in Hackney which is quite emblematic. Of course we have an enormous SureStart behemoth on the edge of London Fields - I'm sure it's very good - but when my favourite mayoral candidate Boff was councillor in Queensbridge, he raised the issue of the Labour council refusing to give two mums who wanted to set up their own nursery the 200 quid they needed to get their lavs up to standard. This is how creativity, ownership and empowerment are stamped out by socialism. The mums actually came from one of the communities that Labour go on about helping, which serves only to underline the point.

[Simon Newman]

This is all nonsense. There's mountains of evidence from the USA that these programs simply don't work. Even the most intensive give only temporary benefits that have vanished by the time children reach their late teens.

If you want to alleviate social breakdown, you can't do it with child-centred programs. To start with it needs functioning families, with a married mother & father, with the father in employment.

[May Ignima]

I have to agree with Simon Newman, you have to centre policy around the family, not just the children. Regardless of their nationality, size or age of parents, policy still has to be around family. That's my opinion anyway.